UV Strips for seamless flowing textures in UE4
polycounter lvl 11
I've recently been reverse engineering some example content in UE4 and I came across some of the flowing fluid materials and meshes from the Elemental Demo a long while ago. One thing I was noticing is that the texture is pretty much a panning tileable texture moving in a single direction, but the beauty of the effect is that the UV's are all layed out in strips that are welded together.
I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on how the guys at Epic layed out the UV's for this mesh in strips, but also all of the UV's being welded into a single shell so the flowing texture moves along the mesh seamlessly.
I'm wondering if maybe they started from a single strip mapped plane and iterated over that to get the more organic shape, adding edges and bevels to round it out without touching the original strip plane UV's. Then you could just copy the modeled out strips and rotate them and connect them with a few bridges and never touch the UV's. But at some point all of the pieces were combined and welded into a single island which seems like it would totally distort the UV's
The other thing I was thinking is maybe each section was broken into parts and then uv'd with the ribbon tool in something like Max but that still doesnt explain how it maintained its straight/clean UVs after all the shells were welded together.
I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on how the guys at Epic layed out the UV's for this mesh in strips, but also all of the UV's being welded into a single shell so the flowing texture moves along the mesh seamlessly.
I'm wondering if maybe they started from a single strip mapped plane and iterated over that to get the more organic shape, adding edges and bevels to round it out without touching the original strip plane UV's. Then you could just copy the modeled out strips and rotate them and connect them with a few bridges and never touch the UV's. But at some point all of the pieces were combined and welded into a single island which seems like it would totally distort the UV's
The other thing I was thinking is maybe each section was broken into parts and then uv'd with the ribbon tool in something like Max but that still doesnt explain how it maintained its straight/clean UVs after all the shells were welded together.
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